Being recommended by people you know can be as important for virtual recruitment as with traditional methods, new research has suggested.

In a recent paper, Professor Catherine Thomas from Columbia Business School in New York found that workers who had received a “stamp of approval” from other workers on online platform oDesk.com tripled their chances of finding employment.

“This was one of the ironies that we came across in our research,” Thomas told Recruiter. “You would have thought that technology would make these personal connections obsolete, but at least in this particular case it seemed to be the opposite.”

ODesk.com allows firms to view the profiles of thousands of applicants for projects such as web design and data entry that can be carried out remotely around the world, often in low-wage countries, such as India. The US, followed by UK-based organisations. are the two biggest users.

One feature of oDesk is the presence of so-called ’agencies’. These are not traditional recruitment agencies, Thomas explained, but groups of oDesk workers, “basically people who know each other in real life, who often attended the same school, or lived in the same town.”

Agencies can also ask other workers to join them as affiliates, and once a worker has become affiliated, this greatly increased chances of finding work on oDesk, Thomas said.

According to Thomas, while only one in 10 of the 1.3m workers registered with oDesk were affiliated, those who were took more than a third of the jobs.

Gary Swart, oDesk’s CEO, rejected any suggestion that affiliated groups threatened the principle of recruitment on merit.

Swart told Recruiter that the online profile for independent contractors versus those associated with the oDesk agencies was “nearly identical”, the only difference being a small “affiliated with” badge that identifies the oDesk agency the contractor works through.

“Whether or not [oDesk] agency managers and agency contractors ’know each other in real life’ has little impact on those contractors’ potential to get hired by employers,” he said.

Swart added: “In the past year, 7.2% of those who signed up in the past year are affiliated with agencies, and 21% of all employed contractors are agency-affiliated.”